ARKIV, DEMOKRATI OG RETTFERD - Norsk kulturråd

of the national security secrecy
state in the United States,
Ericson pleaded with archival
educators to «instill on our
students an ethic of activism
that will start them thinking in
proactive terms.» He encouraged
established professionals
to stay abreast of current
affairs and forge «more formal
relationships» and ally with
activist organizations battling
the «culture of secrecy.» On the
level of personal responsibility,
Ericson pleaded with the
profession to «make activism a
priority and position ourselves
as a profession that really is
interested in and knowledgeable
about issues such as access
to government records and
their value to maintaining our
civil liberties.» Ericson called
on the profession to not settle
for quaint «soft news» stories
about our profession’s noble
preservation of national heritage,
and instead take action to
become more visible in the hard
news pages on issues of pressing
national import. As a means
of underscoring this value and
demonstrating its potential, he
related a story of how a personal
email to a reporter on a local
dispute on access to internal
email of a local county board,
fed into a formally published
letter in the paper that led to a
local radio interview on access
to electronic public records to
a request for an interview for a
feature article on public access
to public records. Ericson’s key
point is the recognition that
«people are interested in these
issues [and that] we need to
take advantage of that fact and
use it to spread our message and
weigh in on the side of access to
public records.» (Ericson, p. 52.)
I believe that a useful argument
can be made on the connection
between technically
«illegal» leaking of records and
archives and the struggle for
justice. Leaking has become a
fundamental tactic for entering
information in the mainstream
outside of official, legal, and
ethical channels. However,
reading any daily newspaper
witnesses time and again the
mentioning and citation of
leaked documents, that I have
found provide critical information
that oftentimes directly
challenges the comfortable
and confident stories offered
by official spokespersons. It is
sometimes through the practice
of leaking that society can enter
into meaningful discussions
about current events.
Conclusion
Ultimately, though, I believe
that the connection between
archives and justice depends,
in part, upon a sharp examination
of what types of archives
survive, which do not, and why
this is the case. It also depends
in part on sharp examinations of
«document viewing»: Who gets
to create, edit, use, withhold,
and destroy? And to what effect?
Only by looking expansively at
the role, biography, and genealogy
of the available written
historical record and the stories
they can tell and, perhaps more
significantly, cannot tell, can we
assess versions of history based
off such sources. We need to
better understand when and
how and under what conditions
the stories held by archives provide
extremely poor history and
contemplate on what corrective
actions are possible.
It is a sad fact that almost
all of human history is permanently
irretrievable. We
may have documents that can
shine insights into the past,
but the voices of the majority
of humanity are lost. That is
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